In Review: Fantasy Illustration

Illustrations are supposed to illustrate something. These books are collections of illustrations separated from the texts they were meant to accompany. Anyone browsing through them has no choice but to see these pictures as works of art in their own right, and not as illustrations at all.

In fact, that is just what the editors of at least two of these collections intend. In Fantasy, Brigid Peppin says, "Such illustrators as Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen are now recognized as remarkable artists." And in The Fantastic Kingdom, David Larkin says, "While the pictures obviously illuminate the tales that inspired them, each stands alone as an intriguing and magical vision." Both comments imply that mere illustrators are lesser beings than real artists; these particular illustrators are praised for doing more than merely illuminating texts, for being "remarkable" artists whose work can stand alone. In fact, The Fantastic Kingdom cares so little for the existence of these pictures as illustrations that it expands them all to the size of a full page, and prints them on one side only. They are eminently suitable for framing and hanging—for consideration as real works of art.

William Feaver's book is different. It makes no specific claim for the artistry of the pictures it contains beyond their illustrative nature. Its purpose is less to admire beauty than to offer a survey; the pictures include everything from Cruikshank to Sendak and from Ernest Shepherd to Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. But exactly because that is so, it is hard to see any purpose in removing these pictures from their original contexts. The explanatory text that accompanies them is minimal, and offers little justification for the choice of these particular pictures; and the pictures are, quite simply, not interesting to look at by themselves.

I would guess that is true of any good illustration —it complements a text, and needs the text to complete it. But the illustrations in the collections by Larkin and Peppin ARE interesting —more interesting than logic might suggest. Why should it be pleasurable to look at a picture meant to illustrate a text when the text isn't there, and when the story it depicts isn't familiar? Why should these theoretically incomplete experiences be so satisfying?

Part of the answer is that most of the illustrators these books deal with worked when there was what Peppin calls "a unique flowering of book illustration as an art form." Circumstances were such that these men could think of themselves as artists and of their works as art. Peppin tells us that the gift books they illustrated were "intended for the drawing room rather than for the library or the nursery." They were always meant to be gratifying as objects in themselves; it's unlikely that anybody ever bought these elaborate (and expensive) books for the stories they contained, or for grubby little fingers to handle. In fact, the pictures of Rackham and Dulac and Nielson are characterized by a rich texture and a decidedly dense atmosphere that needs nothing to complete it —not the imagination of an audience, and not even the stories the pictures are supposed to refer to. These pictures do not really comment on stories or enhance them. They merely use stories as suggestions, starting points for self-sufficient pictures that are characterized best by their self-inclusiveness, the utter lack of involvement their sensuous overstatement demands from their viewers. In this way, they are similar to the arrogantly sensuous pictures of Frazetta and other contemporary fantasy artists.

If their descendants are clear, so is their ancestry. They are late manifestations of the Victorian tradition of narrative art, pictures which imply dramatic situations. Part of the pleasure of looking at them is guessing what story they tell, trying to figure out why the pimply...